The Edison Motion Picture Myth

Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press. Very Good-. 1961. First Edition. Softcover. [externally scuffed and shelfworn, short diagonal crease at bottom corner of rear cover, remainder stripes on top and bottom edges of text block; internally clean, binding solid]. Trade PB (B&W photographs) A pioneering and indispensible work of early film history. The author brought a professional historian's discipline and reliance on original sources to a field which prior to that time had consisted almost entirely of anecdotal histories and self-serving memoirs, riddled with distortions and inaccuracies which went unchallenged, and yet were woven into the fabric of future histories of the early cinema. Hendricks wrote of "the morass of well-embroidered legend with which the beginning of the American film is permeated," and proceeded to take on the biggest and most persistent legend of all, that the movies had been "invented" by Thomas Edison. Although he bent over backwards to avoid appearing "anti-Edison," his methodical sifting and analysis of the evidence (much of it to be found in Edison's own archives) couldn't evade the truth, and established beyond question that Edison himself was virtually uninvolved in the actual work of "inventing" the movies, which was mostly performed either by W.K.L. Dickson of his own staff, or by others toiling outside the Edison orbit. But the power of the myth is strong, and today it's still believed by the general public (to the extent that they think about such things) that "Edison invented the movies." This book will inform you otherwise -- but of course it's been long out of print, as are his two equally valuable follow-ups, "Beginnings of the Biograph" (1964) and "The Kinetoscope" (1966). .